CODE

RED
 INTRODUCTION
THE OPPORTUNITY WE DARE NOT MISS

The Uprising Against Trump and the

Rendezvous with Dignity

Will progressives and moderates feud while America

burns?
Or will these natural allies take advantage of a historic
opportunity to strengthen American democracy and defeat an
increasingly radical form of conservatism?
The choice in our politics is that stark. This book is offered
in a spirit of hope, but with a sense of alarm.
My hope is inspired by the broad and principled opposition
that Donald Trump’s presidency called forth. It is a movement
that can and should be the driving force in our politics long
after Trump is gone. His abuses of office, his divisiveness, his
bigotry, his autocratic habits, and his utter lack of seriousness
about the responsibilities of the presidency drew millions of
previously disengaged citizens to the public square and the
ballot box. The danger he represented inspired young
Americans to participate in our public life at unprecedented
levels. Tens of thousands of Americans, especially women,
have gathered in libraries, diners, and church basements to share
wisdom, to organize, and, in many cases, to run for office
themselves. These newly engaged citizens have created an
opportunity to build a broad alliance for practical
 2 • Code Red

and visionary government as promising as any since the Great

Depression gave Franklin Roosevelt the chance to build the
New Deal coalition.
To seize this opening, progressives and moderates must re-
alize that they are allies who have more in common than they
sometimes wish to admit. They share a commitment to what
public life can achieve and the hope that government can be
decent again. They reject the appeals to racism that have been
Trump’s calling card and the divisiveness at the heart of his
elec- toral strategy. Together, they long for a politics focused on
free- dom, fairness, and the future. This new politics would be
rooted in the economic justice that has always been the left’s
driving goal and in the problem-solving approach to
government that moderates have long championed.
It’s true that these camps often battle over whether the na-
tion should seek restoration or transformation in the years after
Trump. In fact, our country needs both. To restore the demo-
cratic norms we have always valued, we must begin to heal the
social and economic wounds that led to Trump’s presidency in
the first place. Yet there is resistance to common ground
among progressives and moderates alike. They often mistrust
each other’s motives, battle fiercely over tactics, argue over
how much change the country needs, and squabble over
whether specific policy ideas go too far, or not far enough.
The moderate says: “Hey, progressive, you think that if you
just lay out the boldest and most ambitious approach to any
given problem, the people will rally to your side. Really? For
one thing, people may like your objective but think you’re
changing things way more than we have to. And we can battle
to the death over, say, a Democratic Party platform plank or the
first draft of a bill, but without the hard negotiating and
compromising that legislative politics requires, a bold idea will
remain just a plat- form plank. That really doesn’t do anyone
any good. You subject everyone to so many litmus tests that
we might as well be in
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 3

chemistry class. And God save us from your abuse on Twitter

if we disagree with you. You lefties have no idea how to win
elec- tions outside of Berkeley or Brooklyn, and some of your
ideas are so sweeping that they will scare potential voters and
allies away.” At this point, the moderate is likely to wield the
sturdy old punch line: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of
the good.”
“But hold on,” says the progressive, “you moderates spend
so much time negotiating with yourselves that you compromise
away goals and priorities before the real battle even begins.
Your ideas get so soggy and complicated that they mobilize no
one and mostly put people to sleep. Better to have the courage
of your convictions, lay out your hopes plainly and
passionately, and in- spire voters to join you. Besides, you
middle-of-the-roaders were so petrified of Ronald Reagan and
the right wing that you caved in to the Gipper’s economic
ideas, let inequality run wild, and gave us a racist and grossly
unfair criminal justice system. The extremists have pulled the
political center so far right that the only way back to sanity is
to show our fellow citizens what a real progressive program
looks like.”
At the risk of sounding like a perhaps unwelcome counselor
attempting to ease a family quarrel, I would plead with mod-
erates and progressives to listen to each other carefully. If the
events since 2016 do not teach moderates and progressives that
they must find ways of working together, nothing will. If they
fail to heed each other’s advice and take each other’s concerns
seri- ously, they will surrender the political system to an
increasingly undemocratic right with no interest in any of their
shared goals, priorities, and commitments.
Moderates are right about the complexity of getting things
done in a democracy. Even when the boldest ideas have
prevailed, they did so because complex coalitions were built,
important (and, it should be said, often legitimate) interests
were accom- modated, and some lesser goals were left by the
wayside, to be fought for another day. Moderates are also right
that democracy
 4 • Code Red

requires persuading those who are open to change but worry

about how this or that reform might work in practice or affect
them personally. (Think: losing their private health insurance.)
Disdaining as sellouts those who raise inconvenient questions
or express qualms is not the way to build a majority for reform.
Moderates are also right that Americans in large numbers are
tired of a politics that involves more yelling than dialogue,
more demonizing than understanding.
But progressives are right to say that for the last three
decades, moderates have spent too much time negotiating with
themselves. Consider all the effort Democrats put into wooing
Republicans by responding to their proposals to amend
Obamacare, only to have the GOP oppose it anyway and spend
a decade trying to repeal it. Much the same happened with the
2010 Dodd-Frank financial services reform act. Moderates have
too readily accepted the as- sumptions of their opponents,
wasting energy and squandering opportunities by trying to
accommodate a right wing that will never be appeased.
Progressives are also right in saying that our political system
tilts toward the wealthy and the connected. And whether they
call themselves socialists or not, progressives have the
intellectual high ground when they say that today’s capital- ism
—a radical form of the market economy shaped in the 1980s
that is quite different from earlier incarnations—is failing to
serve the needs of Americans in very large numbers.
As I hope is already clear, this book does not make the stan-
dard centrist argument that progressives can’t win unless they
become more moderate. But neither does it make a claim, often
heard among progressives, that moderation is hopeless and the
only way to prevail in a deeply divided country is to mobilize
your own base.
Each of these claims is incomplete. The problems with the
first were underscored by the outcome of the 2016 election:
Moderation alone does not guarantee victory, and the progres-
sive critique of the center has become more persuasive as eco-
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 5

nomic inequality has widened. The problem with the second is

that every electoral contest involves both mobilization and per-
suasion. The important question is to establish where the
balance between the two lies at a given moment. Neither can be
ignored. Democrats certainly got that balance right in the 2018
elec- tions. Moderates and progressives came together
behind a remarkably diverse set of candidates, winning
important gover- nor’s races in states that voted for Trump and
taking control of the House. It was this victory that enabled
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to begin a formal impeachment
inquiry after it was learned that Trump tried to enlist the
Ukrainian government in an effort to smear former vice
president Joe Biden. A coalition for change produced a coalition
for accountability. Maintaining and expand- ing this sense of
unity, I will argue, requires a shared commitment to a set of goals
and principles that I describe as a Politics of Rem-
edy, a Politics of Dignity, and a Politics of More.
Remedy—solving problems, resolving disputes, moving
forward—is the core purpose of democratic politics. Dignity
is at the heart of demands for justice from long-marginalized
groups as well as members of a once secure multiracial work-
ing class displaced by deindustrialization, trade, and technolog-
ical change. And while moderates and progressives may differ
on specifics (single-payer health care versus improvements on
Obamacare, for example), they agree that energetic public
action can provide more Americans with affordable health
insurance, more with decent wages and benefits, more with
family-friendly workplaces, more with good schools, more
with affordable paths to college and effective training
programs, more with unimpeded access to the ballot, more
with adequate provision for retirement, more with security
from gun violence. And, yes, we need to do much more to
combat climate change.
But to forge the alliance American politics needs,
moderates and progressives will have to abandon an unseemly
moralism that feeds political superiority complexes.
 6 • Code Red

Progressives are not the impractical visionaries many mod-

erates suspect them to be, with no concern for how programs
work or how change happens. On the contrary, there are times
when progressives are more practical than their critics in seeing
that piecemeal reforms can be too narrow to solve the problem
at hand, too stingy to create systems that inspire broad-based
political support, and too accommodating to narrow interest
groups. It should always be remembered that without the vision
progressives offer, many reforms would never have been
under- taken. The abolitionists agitated against slavery when
most of the country was indifferent, opening the way for more
moderate and cautious politicians such as Abraham Lincoln to
end the nation’s moral scourge. Laws regulating wages and
hours were viewed as violations of property rights—until they
weren’t. Racial equality was a radical demand until it became
mainstream in the civil rights years. Gay marriage was
opposed as recently as 2012 by a Democratic president.
Progressives continue to broaden a political debate long
hemmed in by the dominance of conservative assumptions and
the stifling of progressive aspirations. Bernie Sanders moved
single-payer health care onto the political agenda, giving the lie
to the idea that Obamacare was socialist and radical. Elizabeth
Warren has suggested far-reaching reforms to capitalism, pro-
posing aggressive action against monopolies and a wealth tax
that would directly address concentrations of economic power.
Warren, Sanders, and their supporters have thus expanded our
policy imaginations. Ideas once cast as “leftist” (an increase
in the capital gains tax comes to mind) were suddenly seen as
“moderate” alternatives.
Moderates are not, as some progressives suspect, agents of
influence for the status quo seeking to channel reformist
energy into safe pathways that leave the powerful undisturbed.
Mod- erates are often as fed up with existing distributions of
power and ways of doing business as are their friends to their
left. But,
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 7

yes, moderates do counsel reformers to be on the lookout

for the unintended consequences of their proposals. They
hold out the hope that one step forward today can be
followed by another step tomorrow—and they can point to
Social Security and advances in health insurance coverage
as examples of when modest first steps eventually led to
more sweeping victories.
Moderation itself embodies specific virtues that any demo-
cratic system needs. The political scientist Aurelian Craiutu
defines them well in his book Faces of Moderation. He notes that
modera- tion “promotes social and political pluralism,” has a
“propensity to seek conciliation and find balance between
various ideas, interests and groups,” and does not assume there
is “only one single cor- rect (or valid) way of life on which we
all might agree.” Moder- ates recognize that “most political and
social issues often involve tough trade-offs and significant
opportunity costs, and require constant small-scale adjustments
and gradual steps.” Moderation is “a form of opposition to
extremism, fanaticism and zealotry,” teaches the virtues of
“self-restraint and humility,” and seeks to keep the conversation
open with “friends, critics and opponents.” All these are habits
and dispositions that progressives and humane conservatives—
no less than moderates themselves—value more highly than
ever after our unfortunate national experiment with their
opposite under Trump.1
Yes, moderates and progressives can drive each other crazy
by being, respectively, too cautious and too rash, and I am not
trying to wish away what are genuine differences between
them. They can disagree over principle (how large a role
should the state play?), over questions of political efficacy
(which sorts of programs can draw majority support?), over
practical concerns (do certain approaches work better than
others?), and over the proper balance of influence in a
democracy between experts and mass movements.
But what they share is, at this moment especially, more im-
portant: a deep belief in democracy and freedom, a commitment
to
 8 • Code Red

public problem solving, a frustration over the collapse of

norms that promote basic decency, and a desire for a fairer
economy that allows all citizens to live in dignity and hope.
As I write, the Trump presidency confronts an impeachment
crisis. Its causes were particular to his abuses—a hangover of
deep mistrust created by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
find- ings, Trump’s subordination of the country’s interests to his
own selfish needs in pressuring the Ukrainian government to
help his reelection, and extravagant and dangerous claims of
presidential immunity from any form of accountability. His
refusal to separate himself fully from his own companies bred
constant suspicion that his every action (including the profoundly
destructive green light he gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan to invade Syria and attack the Kurds) might be linked
to his narrow economic interests. Until his efforts to get a
foreign government to smear Joe Biden became public, moderate
and progressive Democrats in the House were divided over
whether to pursue impeachment. They came together in mutual
revulsion. They were united by shared values and by a
common strategic sense that only an impeach- ment inquiry
would make clear to the country how aberrant and destructive
his behavior was. The reluctance of most Republicans to take on
Trump, in turn, underscored how deeply the party had been
infected by Trumpism. A fear of the effects of speaking out
gripped large parts of the party.
In the face of this radicalized and deformed Republicanism,
the urgency of the progressive/moderate alliance I call for in these
pages will long outlive the Trump presidency. The damage
Trump has done to conservatism (and that conservatives have
done to them- selves) will not be suddenly repaired by his
departure. Trump tri- umphed by exploiting public disaffection
with a political system that many Americans saw as infested
with sleaze and controlled by forces operating entirely for their
own benefit. Rather than being the cure for such maladies, he
was their apotheosis, the culmina- tion of all that has gone wrong
in our politics. Trump’s presidency
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 9

underscored how desperately our system needs reform and our

country needs repair. In the post-Trump era, progressives and
moderates must be prepared to take on these tasks—together.

Political labels are inherently vexing, especially since most

voters don’t care about them very much. They can also change
meaning over time, and they go in and out of style. So a word
on why I have chosen the terms I have.
I use “progressives” to refer to broad left-of-center opinion
because that is the current term of choice among those who
hold such views. I also use it because the word “liberal” is
packed with many different meanings now, given, for
example, the wide- spread use of “neoliberal” to refer to those
who favor a less reg- ulated economy. Broadly, progressives in
these pages are those who favor far-reaching reforms to
remedy inequalities related to class, race, gender, immigration
status, and sexual orientation.
The word “moderate” is even more difficult to pin down,
and a large share of the political science profession is skeptical
that the word has any functional meaning in describing voters.
Public opinion researchers have noted that those labeled as
moderates are not necessarily middle-of-the-road. They often
have a mix of views that can fall at the far ends of opinion on
both sides of the conventional political spectrum. As the
political scientist David Broockman told Vox’s Ezra Klein, a
voter who favors single-payer health care and the deportation
of all illegal immigrants might be deemed a “moderate”
because the average of these two posi- tions lands him or her at
some midpoint on a scale. But neither position can be
described as “centrist” or “moderate.” Moreover, as Klein
noted, voters who fall into the moderate category might well
disagree with each other fundamentally. For the sake of sim-
plicity, imagine one voter who favors legal abortion but
strongly opposes labor unions and another who supports unions
but would ban abortion. Two voters who hold very different
worldviews
 10 • Code Red

might end up in the same hypothetical middle ground because

neither is conventionally “liberal” or “conservative.” 2
While acknowledging these difficulties, I persist in using
the word “moderate” not only because it has currency among
politicians and other political actors but also because I still find
it to be the best description of a significant swath of the elec-
torate. Among Democrats and Independents, it would apply
to those who see themselves as more on the center-left than
the left. They might be more sympathetic to expanding health
insurance coverage through reforms to the Affordable Care
Act than to the creation of a single-payer system, or open to
large-scale expansion of college access without making college
free. Before the radicalization of the Republican Party, support-
ers of the GOP embraced the term “moderate” in significant
numbers. They often found themselves in agreement with more
liberal Democrats on reformist goals related to poverty, edu-
cation, or neighborhood renewal but favored alternative solu-
tions that they saw as more fiscally prudent or market friendly.
That many of these onetime Republican moderates are now
politically homeless is a central reason why they have far more
in common with progressives than with a radicalized form of
conservatism.
I prefer the term “moderate” to “centrist” not only because
political moderation involves the dispositional virtues Craiutu
describes but also because self-conscious “centrists” have often
found themselves chasing a hypothetical middle ground that
has shifted steadily rightward with the GOP’s embrace of ever
more extreme views. Principled moderates are now on the left
side of politics because the right wing that controls the
Republican Party gives them no quarter.
Which brings us to one thing this book is not: a call for a re-
turn to “bipartisanship.” The rise of the radical right in the
GOP means that, for now, the Democratic Party is missing a
reasonable interlocutor. This shift toward a radicalized
conservatism married
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 11

to Trumpism up and down the party is also one reason why

anti-Trump Republicans loomed larger among writers and
commentators than among the party’s politicians. Unlike GOP
politicians, those honorable Never Trump conservative intellec-
tuals and commentators didn’t have to worry about primaries.
Democrats face formidable coalition-management chal-
lenges because they now provide a home to millions of voters
(and scores of elected officials) who in earlier times might well
have been moderate Republicans. This only increases the ur-
gency of common action by progressives and moderates. They
should welcome the rank-and-file defectors from the
Republican Party as allies against Trumpian politics and a
right-wing radi- calism that has turned its back on many of the
most constructive strains of the old GOP.

I am asking progressives and moderates to put aside their dif-

ferences not just for one election, but for the larger purpose of
moving the country forward.
My plea to progressives is to understand the difference be-
tween long-term goals and immediate needs, to see that Martin
Luther King Jr.’s “fierce urgency of now” makes demands on
all advocates of justice. At times, it is indeed a rebuke to those
who evade the need for transformational change and are
addicted to what King memorably called “the tranquilizing
drug of gradual- ism.” But at other moments, it is a call for
negotiation and coali- tion building that focuses on the
importance of making progress today—now—that can be built
on tomorrow.3
We need, for example, to get affordable health insurance to
all Americans as soon as possible, to move quickly to expand
ac- cess to college or training after high school, and to raise
incomes among the least advantaged. Progressives should be
open to big steps toward all these goals, even steps that don’t
conform to their first-choice solutions (single-payer or free
college, for example).
 12 • Code Red

And we need, urgently, to end Trump’s cruel border policies

and the demonization of newcomers. We need immigration
reform to give roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants a
path to citi- zenship, and agreement on future immigration flows.
We need our country to be open to refugees. Playing into Trump
and his follow- ers’ hands by seeming to downplay the need for
border security or offering proposals that make it easier for them
to cast reformers— falsely—as advocate for “open borders” will
make reaching agree- ment on such proposals far harder at a
moment when morality demands action.4
In a democracy, persuasion is an imperative. Considering the
views of your fellow citizens who might be on the fence is not
ti- midity. It’s a democratic obligation. And let’s all face the
obvious: Defeating Trumpism is a precondition to progress of
any kind. Building the broadest possible coalition to bring this
about means welcoming allies with whom we might have
disagreements on matters that are important but, for now, are less
urgent.
Moderates, in turn, need to acknowledge that in reacting to
the long Reagan era, middle-of-the-road politicians (and
liberals who wanted to look middle-of-the-road) made
mistakes bred by excessive caution and, at times, abandoned
principle.
As I will show in more detail, they were too quick to capit-
ulate to the Reagan economic consensus, too eager to buy into
the idea of market supremacy, too quick to deregulate financial
markets, and too keen on winning the approval of financiers.
Yes, the 1994 crime bill was a response to legitimate fears
about a crime wave, but it was absurdly punitive and had
disastrous consequences for African Americans. Along with
similarly dra- conian laws at the state level, it helped lead us
toward what Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim
Crow” and created, as Chris Hayes has written, “a colony in a
nation.” Moderates need to recognize that younger
progressives are frustrated with liberals and Democrats who
never quite got over the setbacks of the 1980s and now act, as
K. Sabeel Rahman, the president
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 13

of the think tank Demos, observed, from “a caution borne out

of fear of the right and out of a progressivism chastened by re-
curring defeat.”5
It is not an excess of wokeness to ask those who are
privileged to ponder how their privilege influences the political
choices they make. And pretending that achieving bipartisan
outcomes is only a matter of will and better personal
relationships is to ignore three decades of Republican
obstruction and rejectionism.
Moreover, going big, as progressives typically suggest, can
often be more politically effective than going small and
careful. Big universal programs (think: Social Security,
Medicare, and the GI Bill) often muster far more support than
modest, targeted schemes. Acting boldly, even stubbornly, on
behalf of the rights of the oppressed and excluded has often
been the only way to sway public opinion in a new direction.
History looks kindly on early advocates of abolition, labor
rights, civil rights, and, more recently, LGBTQ rights.
If our country is to move forward, both sides must be will-
ing to look to each other for guidance. The theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr was right to teach us to seek the truth in our
opponent’s error, and the error in our own truth.
Both sides should also remember that successful political
movements often define what they affirmatively believe after
first coming together in opposition to a status quo they deplore.
Call it the power of negative thinking.
Ronald Reagan used what he opposed—big government,
taxes, and Soviet Communism—to develop his agenda for
change: smaller government, lower taxes, and a forceful
foreign policy. In doing so, he redefined our politics, and his
ideas exer- cised broad sway for nearly three decades.
Trump similarly clarified what moderates and progressives
alike abhor: racial and ethnic intolerance; a disdain for demo-
cratic values; corruption married to corporate dominance; and
the pursuit of brutally divisive politics as a substitute for
problem
 14 • Code Red

solving. As a result, Trump brought the left and moderates to-

gether in support of an open society and democracy, political
reform, and limits on corporate power. Both favor forceful
steps against rising inequality that are a necessary prelude to a
more harmonious republic.
They also share something important with civil rights hero
Fannie Lou Hamer: They are sick and tired of being sick and
tired. They know the costs of remaining on our current path.
They know this is a Code Red moment, for democracy and for
decency. They must act—together—so we can put Trumpism
be- hind us and build something better.

The political approach I describe is not a fantasy. The popular

uprising against Trump led to the verdict American voters ren-
dered in the 2018 midterm elections. Democratic candidates
for the House of Representatives outpolled Republicans by
nearly 10 million votes—a margin roughly 7 million votes
larger than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead just two years
earlier. As a revolt of progressive and moderate voters led by
progressive and moderate candidates, 2018 offers the prototype
of an enduring majority. This is why I devote chapter 1 to an
analysis of what happened in 2018 and what it means for the
future.6
In the following two chapters, I turn to history to explain how
we reached this point. They examine the long-term forces at
work in our politics pushing moderates and progressives
together, and suggest lessons the left and the center can learn
from the past.
The Democrats won in 2018 for the same reason that their
party is the staging ground for nearly all of the difficult debates
over pressing economic and social problems: The
radicalization of the Republican Party has left moderates with
no alternative but to find common ground with progressives.
This is the focus of chapter 2, which looks at history to show
how far the GOP has strayed.
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 15

I have dubbed chapter 3 “a short history of circular firing

squads and enduring achievements.” It looks at how liberals
and progressives, moderate reformers and socialists, have
alternately battled each other and worked together since the
Progressive Era. The larger story of American reform helps
explain both current tensions and the renewal of energy on the
left. This history also points to earlier mistakes worth avoiding
and successful strate- gies still worth pursuing.
Chapter 4 takes on what many might regard as the most un-
expected development in American politics: the resurgence of
democratic socialism. It turns out that what socialism means to
many who embrace it is, not surprisingly, quite different from
the caricature presented by the right. Its emergence reflects the
collapse of the Reagan economic consensus, progressives’
frus- trations with neoliberalism, and the continued rise of
inequality even after the Clinton and Obama years.
I will argue that while Republicans will seek to weaponize
the S-word against Democrats (as the GOP has done since the
days of the New Deal), the new interest in socialism reflects a
larger yearning across a broad range of opinion for an
economy in which morality plays a larger role, the powerful
are held ac- countable, and wage and salary workers are
protected.
Moving forward in politics requires coming to a settlement
about the past—and, on the broad center-left, this means
coming to terms with the legacies of Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama. In chapter 5, I argue that they had important successes
in grappling with the immediate problems facing the country,
but neither overturned the broad assumptions that had
governed American economic policy since the 1980s. The
former is why most mod- erates and—especially in Obama’s
case—many progressives still honor their presidencies. The
latter is why many progressives see both as falling short. It’s
essential, I argue, to see their presiden- cies whole: to
recognize their achievements, and to turn now to the work they
left unfinished. It is a political and historical error
 16 • Code Red

to leave their legacies undefended. It is also a mistake to ignore

the reasons why they left many progressives frustrated.
Over the next several chapters, I deal with four issues that
have been particularly vexing for progressives and moderates
alike: the structure of the economy, the renewed political power
of identity, the rise of nationalism, and the United States’ role
in the world. In all these areas, moderates and progressives
have often allowed themselves to become too preoccupied with
in- ternecine battles, casting many issues as either/or choices
that obscured more than they clarified, and privileged the hunt
for heretics over the search for converts. In these chapters, I
engage with the thinking of intellectuals, policy specialists, and
activists, and also of politicians, including many of the 2020
Democratic presidential candidates, some of whom are no
longer in the con- test. This book is absolutely not an effort to
pick winners or losers. The candidates I bring into the story are
mentioned because their arguments and proposals help illuminate
the debates I describe.
Chapter 6 shows how adventurous proposals—among them
single-payer health care, free college, and the Green New Deal
— have opened space for new policy advances. At the same
time, I argue for a focus on goals rather than specific policies.
Universal health insurance coverage is a legitimate litmus test,
for example, but single-payer health care should be seen as
simply one path toward achieving it. I also show that free
college and the Green New Deal are not nearly as radical as
you might think. And I make the case that dignity—a focus on
empowering individuals in their professional, family, and
community lives—should be the focal point of economic
policy.
Donald Trump’s explicit racism deepened conflicts around
race, gender, religion, culture, and sexuality, with sharp
divisions along generational lines. What would a constructive
approach to what is often called “identity politics” (usually by
its foes) look like? Can progressives link workers’ rights with
civil rights, racial and gender equality with social justice more
broadly? Chapter 7
 The Opportunity We Dare Not Miss • 17

argues that there is no escaping the need for both a politics of

distribution and a politics of recognition. They can and must be
brought together as equally essential components of all
struggles for social justice and enhanced democracy—and
against bigotry, racism, and exclusion.
Chapter 8 explores the rise of nationalism, the advantage
for progressives in advancing an inclusive patriotism as an
alterna- tive to Trump’s narrow “America First” approach, and
the role of immigration in fostering nationalist feeling. I also
discuss how community and social breakdown have created
fertile ground for ethno-nationalist appeals.
In chapter 9, I argue that the architects of a post-Trump
inter- nationalist foreign policy will have to pay far closer
attention to the economic interests of average Americans, as
Franklin Roo- sevelt and Harry Truman did in their time, and
link the battle for democracy to the fight against kleptocracy
and corruption. They should also revisit the idea of
containment as an approach to China and Russia while
acknowledging in China’s case that a pure replay of the Cold
War is neither in America’s interests nor the world’s. Our
citizens will embrace an active American role in the world
only if the stewards of foreign policy accept their own duties to
those who do the nation’s work and, when necessary, fight its
wars. I argue that foreign policy is, perhaps surprisingly, an
area of particular promise for synthesis and dialogue between
moderates, who tend to support a traditional liberal internation-
alism, and progressives, who insist that economic justice and
shared prosperity should be central goals of the United States’
approach to the world.
The book concludes, in chapter 10, with a discussion of val-
ues that could bring Americans back together. It imagines what
can be accomplished if progressives and moderates create a
new politics. Politics alone certainly cannot cure all that ails
us. But we have, at the least, a right to expect that it can do
much less harm than it’s doing now. And making politics less
fractious and
 18 • Code Red

more welcoming could help restore our faith in the

possibilities of mutual understanding and common action.
Donald Trump’s misdeeds created an immediate crisis for
the nation. But his rise also reflected a longer-term crisis of
national self-confidence. Americans have drawn apart from
one another politically, socially, and economically. It falls to
progressives and moderates, working in concert, to find a path
toward solidar- ity, empathy, and hope. They will meet this
responsibility only by challenging themselves to act more
strategically, think more clearly, and accept the responsibilities
that history now imposes upon them.

From CODE RED by E. J. Dionne, Jr. Copyright © 2020

by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s
Publishing Group.